Howard Sullens
Yesterday and today, my family and I had the privilege to meet so many members of the Culpeper community who know Lynn and had a special place in their heat for her. Learning this provided us with the comfort to know that Lynn was not only blessed by her own family, but by a large extended family of so many wonderful people.
When we first moved to Amissville over 16 years ago, we had envisioned raising our children in such an environment. We wanted to raise our children in a community of friendly people with warm smiles and open hearts. A community of family, of faith, of hope and of opportunity. A community of wonderful people.
And throughout the years it has been the efforts of Lynn to provide our children with opportunities to learn music, to participate in school activities, to play sports, mostly soccer, and summer activities with their friends who lived both close and far from us. She had taken on the challenges of managing the family; she was our activity planner, our financial wizard, our dreamer, and most of all, our leader.
And even with all of these challenges, we would talk and plan and agree on just about everything that involved our children’s future. It was as if our thought processes were always the same. When it came to the welfare of our family, Lynn and I were always on the same page, we were one. And like all parents, we wanted to provide our children with all of the opportunities that we could to grow and learn, to succeed and be happy, to have a better life, and a brighter future.
After we first moved here, we would have cookouts from time to time with several of our the neighbors who also had children close to the ages of our children, and on one occasion while relaxing and watching our children at play, one of my neighbors had said to me, “I want to give my children the opportunity to grow up and bury me”. At first, it did not dawn on me exactly what he meant, seemed a little eerie to me because as adults we were all just in our late 30’s to early 40’s with children in the later part of elementary school, and talking about death at that time was about the last thing that I really wanted to discuss. In fact, having our children bury us did not seem like much of an opportunity to me at that time. But after replaying what he said over and over in my mind, I began to realize what he meant, and how devastating it would be if the circumstances were to be reversed.
And with the passing of my own parents after that time, I began to realize that this also would be their wish, to have their children become adults, to be married and have families, to be happy and productive, and to be there to say goodbye.
So when I told this to Lynn and we discussed it, we felt that this was one of the most important opportunities we could give our children, and was more of an obligation upon us to do everything possible to make it happen. And as the years would pass and our challenges would grow with our children, we would spend much of our time talking, and worrying, and strategizing, and sleepless nights trying our best to meet and overcome these challenges.
And so today, through all the years of joy, and pain, of laughter and tears, of worry and prayer, and the undying love and devotion that only a mother can provide, Lynn has fulfilled her obligation, and has given her children that very opportunity.
